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State Tries To Calm Voters' Data Fears As Many Cancel Registrations

WFDD image of NCBOE FAQ by Paul Garber.

North Carolina voters have made hundreds of complaints to the state Board of Elections over information being shared with a federal commission investigating voter fraud - and their anger has prompted many of them to take action.

The board has received almost 400 emails, along with hundreds of phone calls about the data request from the Trump commission.

The board insists it's turning over only the data that is already publicly available. That includes voter names, party registrations, addresses and voting history. The voting history covers the elections that residents cast a ballot in but not the candidate for whom they voted.

It isn't turning over private information it collects for verification but does not make available to the public, like dates of birth, and Social Security and driver's license numbers.

Confusion over the data request led the board to release a detailed FAQ about what information was requested, what will be released, and why.

Several voters with concerns about their information have asked that their voter registrations be cancelled.

The board is discouraging people from making that move, reminding them that even if they chose to take themselves off of the state's voter rolls, they will still be included in the data that is being provided to the federal commission.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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